Fall 2019 semester public programs

The fall 2019 semester at Columbia GSAPP includes a full schedule of lectures, conferences, and special events that play an integral role in fulfilling the school’s commitment to fostering a lively community of intellectual generosity and the open exchange of ideas. Following is a selection of the semester’s highlights; please visit the website event calendar to see the full schedule. All activities are free and open to the public.

The Green New Deal
As a part of their ”Power: Infrastructure in America“ project, the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture is organizing a series of research, curricular, and programming initiatives to consider the social, technical, and political contours of the ambitious proposal known as the Green New Deal throughout the semester. Events include a GSAPP-hosted simulcast of “Designing a Green New Deal” on September 13 with lunchtime discussion led by Jaffer Kolb; “Public Works for a Green New Deal” in Wood Auditorium on September 27; and “The Green New Deal: A Public Assembly” at the Queens Museum on November 17. 

Building Cultures: Making in Nairobi, Lagos, Accra, and Johannesburg
September 6, 1pm, Room 114, Avery Hall
This event explores the work of four makers—Nifemi Marcus Bello, Naeem Biviji, Thabisa Mjo, and DK Osseo-Asare—working in different media focused on the process of production as much as the product. The conversation is moderated by Mpho Matsipa with an introduction by Josh Jordan.

Space Settlements book launch 
September 19, 6:30pm, Room 114, Avery Hall
Fred Scharmen, author of Columbia Books on Architecture and the City’s recent release Space Settlements, participates in a conversation with James Graham and Felicity Scott. The book focuses on a 1975 Summer Study during which NASA brought together a team of physicists, engineers, and space scientists—along with architects, urban planners, and artists—to design large-scale space habitats for millions of people. A product of its time, this work is nevertheless relevant to contemporary modes of thinking about architecture. 

1919: Black Water
Exhibition opening and discussion: September 27, 6pm, Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, Buell Hall 
Artist Torkwase Dyson presents new site-specific paintings and sculpture that respond to the 100th anniversary of the “Red Summer” of 1919, a period of heightened racial violence across the US. She explores a tragic episode that unfolded in the segregated waters of Chicago’s South Side beaches, which provides a historical framework to think through the contested geography of water and the relationships between race, climate migration, and the architectural imagination. On the ocassion of the opening, Dyson will be in conversation with invited guests, followed by a reception.

Narrative Practice: The 5th Annual Urban Design Storytelling symposium 
October 4, 1pm, Room 114, Avery Hall
As media and design increasingly converge, this symposium asks how narrative strategies—of novelists, journalists, filmmakers, and activists—reflect design methodologies, from performing a site analysis to evaluating success. Organized by the Columbia GSAPP Urban Design Program.

Digital Urbanisms conference
October 11, 9:30am, Wood Auditorium
This one-day symposium organized by Leah Meisterlin brings together urban researchers and practitioners to take stock of the digital processes and products shaping cities, their promises and problems, and discuss alternatives and approaches for operating within and against the uneven spaces they characterize.

Ruralism Dialogues
November 15, 1pm, 114 Avery Hall
This event is an opportunity to discuss the relationship between country and city—not in opposition, as in rural vs. urban, but as associations between people and nature, settlement and landscape, society and its resources. GSAPP faculty members Noah Chasin, Ziad Jamaleddine, Andrés Jaque, Kaja Kühl, and Galia Solomonoff present their projects and discuss their coursework focusing on the “rural” as an emergent terrain for research, architecture, and urban design.

A Bookish Party: 2019 releases  
November 22, 6:30pm, 115 Avery Hall
Join us to celebrate the recent releases of Columbia Books on Architecture and the City together with 2019 releases by Columbia GSAPP faculty members.

Lecture series
Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall unless otherwise noted.

Shohei Shigematsu, OMA New York
Response by Amale Andraos
September 9, 6:30pm​

Jesse LeCavalier
Introduction and response by Kate Orff
September 16, 6:30pm

Marina Tabassum 
The Kenneth Frampton Endowed Lecture
Response by Kenneth Frampton 
​September 23, 6:30pm

Paola Antonelli 
Katharina Otto-Bernstein Screening Room, Lenfest Center for the Arts 
Introduction by Carol Becker and response by Amale Andraos
Co-Presented by Barnard and Columbia College’s Architecture Department, Columbia GSAPP, Columbia University School of the Arts, and Columbia’s MA in Modern and Contemporary Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies Program (MODA).
October 3, 6:30pm

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg 
Response by David Benjamin
October 7, 6:30pm

Eleena Jamil
Response by Hilary Sample
October 14, 6:30pm

Mario Gooden, Huff + Gooden Architects
Performance in collaboration with Jonathan Gonzalez and Thuto Durak Somo.
October 21, 6:30pm

Henry Cobb, Pei Cobb Freed & Partners 
Response by Laurie Hawkinson 
October 28, 6:30pm

Richard Sennett
Introduction and Response by Weiping Wu 
November 6, 6:30pm

David Adjaye
The Forum at Columbia University 
Response by Thelma Golden and Amale Andraos 
Co-presented with Columbia World Projects
November 7, 6:30pm

Elizabeth Diller, Diller Scofidio + Renfro
Response by Amale Andraos 
November 11, 6:30pm

Emanuel Christ, Christ & Gantenbein
Response by Anna Puigjaner
November 18, 6:30pm